"Avantslash
is touting a user hosted perl script that, if
paired with any web browser with JavaScript, promises to shave crucial bytes
off of the standard Slash-based experience, one of which is our very own SoylentNews. Audiences include
those with very limited bandwidth, such as those in developing countries with
only 2G mobile access or dialup."

Just send out a SHA hash of the front page.For example "1ad65bfb0225ec69e82d5a632da603b2cd4ac77c" uses of far less data than does all those wordy headlines and summaries you currently use! Anyone who can't figure out how to back the page from the hash should just go back to that other site!

Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?(Score: 5, Informative) by hankwang on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:17AM

Developer here. Although it's perl, I'm afraid that trying to integrate it with slash is doomed. It won't scale with the kind of load on SN or/. . And frankly, parsing html code with tens of regular expressions is not what you'd do if it runs on the same server as SN. (wouldn't do it anyway if I had to write it from scratch today, but this is how it evolved over 10 years, and it does the job)

But the UI and lightweight html could serve as inspiration for a mobile engine for SN.

Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?(Score: 2, Interesting) by goodie on Thursday March 13 2014, @01:52AM

THIS! I think that if this proves as good as it seems (can't wait to try it on my iphone during my commute tomorrow) we should find a way to "integrate" it with the SN codebase. After all what you do (if I understand it well) is reformat the info to fit a mobile device. There's no reason that we can't do that straight from the SN source without having to resort to the technique you guys have to use (which is normal on your side of the fence). Heck, in the future, we could have a simple cookie storing the mobile or desktop version of the site for viewing and redirect/pick a css based on that. I don't know if it just changes the look or involves different data as well for example.

But I do read SN a lot on my iphone when I wait for appointments, meetings, etc. so it would be great to have this integrated into the SN codebase I think. Plus we may find that there is a lot more demand than we though for something like this if we can track the pages served by this "module"/functionality.

Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?(Score: 4, Informative) by hankwang on Thursday March 13 2014, @07:27AM

Apparently, slashcode is rather convoluted. I think Mattie.p stated that it is difficult to implement skinning. I had a look at slashcode and it seems that there are many, many layers between parsing the cgi parameters and generating output. I couldn't figure out the code path from grepping the code. It looks like making a truly mobile layout, not just applying different css, requires changes all over the code base.

I suspect that slashdot dragging their feet all those years with a mobile version has to do with the difficulty of implementing it. And that was with the original author, CmdrTaco/Rob Malda, on the team.

Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?(Score: 1) by goodie on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:58PM

I see... Maybe there is a way for SN to set up something on the side that consumes the data and skins separately from the main code while the mobile version only allows reading articles and comments? I admit that i have never looked at the SN codebase so if is all Perl from the late 90's it may not really have an api that we can call so to speak...

Hey if we move toward a complete rewrite maybe this could be a good starting point to slowly build the new code up...

Re:Why not merge into Slashcode?(Score: 3, Interesting) by evilviper on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:17AM

Because it's essentially a proxy... Having the ad-blocking, excess-markup-stripping, and caching proxy (ala Privoxy) on the server-side (instead of somewhere on the user premises) at least partially defeats the very purpose...

And in that regard, I'd say the RSS feed should be vastly more bandwidth-light for the stories and links. And for the comments, you can always check-mark "Simple Design" and "Low Bandwidth" in your user preferences.

I don't mind the look, for a mobile web site, but it's a bit feature-bare when it comes to viewing, navigating, and leaving comments.

--Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.

Well, I think others have already answered this. Firstly, the Dept field tends to be lighthearted unless the topic for discussion is grave and deserving of a more serious approach. In this case, I chose the lighthearted feel. Secondly, Having spent everyday since we started slashcott providing support of some description to the guys doing the hard work, I am only too aware of the problems caused by the rats' nest of perl code that is at the heart of this project. Finally, going back and looking at perl after many years away from it - and having discovered Python in the meantime - I am amazed that I ever managed to write anything that was maintainable all those years ago. I know all the retorts about anyone can write bad code in any language, but reading perl does not feel as natural as reading many other languages, despite its obvious power and the large treasure trove that is CPAN. If it is your favourite language, good on you, but don't take offence at my poor attempt at a light-hearted quip.

Re:I just set this upRe:I just set this up(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:39AM

I actually like your comment layouts better than the SoylentNews version. It lets you see more postings by default instead of having to click the links to view each of them. Pick this format up SoylentNews!!!!!

Re:I just set this up(Score: 1) by zafiro17 on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:21PM

Many, many thanks! I hope you leave the site up - it's very useful. I happen to like the layout better than I do the original, and I'm hugely grateful for the savings in bandwidth. This is going to be the first page I visit, and I'll go to Soy directly if I need to comment.

--Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey

A redundant array of networked devices(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:18AM

How about a system where content served from SN can be mirrored from user PCs? A browser plugin or program for which can receive data from SoylentNews and distribute it to other PCs via http in the same way that BT works?

Granted, some files will be updating every few minutes.. but still, for older stories and cached files it may be be beneficial.

Coupla Important PointsCoupla Important Points(Score: 5, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Thursday March 13 2014, @01:00AM

This is a teaser, that's what this is. The office at this end is still busy, and can't write proper slash yet (no, not that kind of slash, rather the other kind). However, stuff is cu^Homing very soon!

Right over there, in front of the Soylent office heart-shaped bed, stand LaminatorX and mattie_p. They're wearing leather loincloths, and nothing else. There is a lot of muscular physique on show. What are they going to do? I'm glad you asked! They'll do all kinds of things, and we'll find out what. But only after there's more time on this end. Stay tuned!

Re:Seems Rather PointlessRe:Seems Rather Pointless(Score: 1) by VanessaE on Thursday March 13 2014, @05:54AM

Simple. If you only manage to shave off 1kB per page, you're already looking at 5GB/mo less bandwidth for the 5M views/month this site gets now. If Soylent can manage to get to Slashdot-levels of traffic (15M views/mo) and the savings is more substantial, say 25 kB per page, then you're talking about 375 GB/mo in saved bandwidth.

Consider for a moment how much time it would take to send 375 GB, and what else one could do with that bandwidth if it's just being wasted now.

Multiply that again by however much traffic all of the other Slashcode-using sites are getting, combined.

Also consider that not every geek has a particularly fat pipe. A few seconds saved here and there loading pages adds up.

Re:Seems Rather Pointless(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:02AM

What's the point of shaving off relatively nothing in the first place?

When I do a copy-paste of the current home page into a text editor, then count characters, I get something near 20kB. In other words, if all you had was text, your download would be a tenth of the size. I wouldn't call a 90% reduction "relatively nothing".

Re:Seems Rather Pointless(Score: 3, Insightful) by hankwang on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:40AM

What's the point you ask? During my daily train commute, I pass through an area with patchy 2G coverage, with just a few kB/s transfer rate. At work (it's on a "high tech campus", well, well) it depends on which side of the building I am in.

And the layout is more suitable for mobile rendering. Although for SN the layout is manageable on modern mobile devices, you should remember that it was really written for slashdot, with SN support as a new feature.

Browse on over to your Homepage http://soylentnews.org/my/homepage [soylentnews.org] and check "Simple Design", "Low Bandwidth" and "No Icons". Et voila, a lot less cluttered and (opinion) cleaner look. Although you do lose some functionality as a trade off.

Maybe that could be used as the basis for a "mobile.soylent" incarnation if the need is there?

This comment page is TWENTY times heavier than the sourced from the digester. Most of it is cached in browser, but still on first access or on expire it will load 100kB of javascript files, that are actually pretty useless.Maybe we can shave off from that?

There's some damn low-hanging fruit w.r.t. to Javascript and stuff on the site. For non-admins, I don't think we're actually using JS anywhere in the layout. backSlash goes snicker-snap if you disable JS, but I think we can safely make all those JS files conditional loads on is_admin and NOT break the site.

It WAS used for firehose, but that feature is so nackered, I don't think its coming back without a rewrite.

How about adding a user-agent dropdown as part of the homepage preferences? Then for my desktop mozilla I can have the full blown experience. For my mobile browser I could pick Simple+Low/B+No Icons. When I visit preferences there could be a "default" for all UAs and a (+) button to add my current UA.

That should make a friendly "mobile" soylent site with (hopefully) little extra coding.

--"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy